On 1/5/12 5:54 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> I would also like to take argument against one (strange) assumption that's been made in this thread: forums are not about people randomly entering in to follow one topic and then bugger off again.
I think you misinterpreted my comment on the matter.
None of the forums I have encountered have had a way to automatically
follow all discussion threads on the forum, all in a threaded way,
without polling. If you just wanted to follow _some_ of the threads,
they were OK: you could just follow per-thread RSS feeds. But following
all threads including any new threads that might come up has been a huge
pain point for me.
Now maybe there are forums that make this possible somehow, but I don't
see how given the basic design and premises of forums. If such things
_do_ exist I'd love to see an example.
So forums tend to more or less enforce an opt-in model, where you have
to explicitly opt in to follow a thread. That model works great for
some people and some situations, but I'm not sure it's the right one for
this mailing list and it's current membership. It _would_ be the right
one for many people not currently involved in this list.
> They are intended to do what mailing lists do, better.
Mailing lists do many different things, depending on context. Forums do
some of them better, but others worse...
> But, there is a very big reason why there are a lot of forums in the owrld and not very many mailing lists.
Because setting up a forum tends to be easier for one thing, from what
I've seen. And can allow anonymous posting (though few do).
> Your preferences may be different, but you're statistically outnumbered if you prefer mailing lists (which doesn't mean mailing lists are wrong for www-style, I'm specifying a trend for general web users).
The interesting thing is not general web users but people who would be
interested in participating in www-style and have something useful to
contribute, who would tend to be a radically different demographic from
"average web users", I suspect.
Again, I agree that _starting_ to use www-style is harder than starting
to use a forum. But using it day in and day out is, imo, easier.
-Boris